Tag: blockchain

Hailed as one of the most potent solutions to cryptocurrency scaling currently under development, the lightning network effectively creates a layer on top of bitcoin, enabling fast and cheap transactions which can net settle to the bitcoin blockchain. Proposed by Thaddeus Dryja and Joseph Poon in a 2015 white paper, the idea is based on a…

From a cruising altitude, a blockchain might not look that different from things you’re familiar with, say Wikipedia. With a blockchain, many people can write entries into a record of information, and a community of users can control how the record of information is amended and updated. Likewise, Wikipedia entries are not the product of…

ICO stands for “initial coin offering,” and refers to the creation and sale of digital tokens. In an ICO, a project creates a certain amount of a digital token and sells it to the public, usually in exchange for other cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin or ether. The public could be interested in the tokens on…

Bitcoin was originally created as an alternative, decentralized payment method. Unlike international bank transfers at the time, it was low-cost and almost instantaneous. An added benefit for merchants (less so for users) was that it was irreversible, removing the threat of expensive charge-backs. However, the improvement in domestic payment methods and the rapid development of alternative (non-cryptocurrency)…

To cut through some of the confusion surrounding bitcoin, we need to separate it into two components. On the one hand, you have bitcoin-the-token, a snippet of code that represents ownership of a digital concept – sort of like a virtual IOU. On the other hand, you have bitcoin-the-protocol, a distributed network that maintains a…